This is the final post in a series of posts exploring lyrics touching upon the notions of “Church” and “State” written during the eighties.

Post 1 can be linked to here. Post 2 is accessed here. Post 3 is connected here. Post 4 is here. Post 5 can be found by clicking here. Post 6 is here, Post 7 is here and Post 8 is here.

Since the time of the song being penned we have lived through the terms of office of George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton and George W Bush. As we crawl out of 2008 into a new year, we also sit on the cusp of a new presidency in Barack Obama. There is a quote that seemed to be everywhere toward the latter months of the year:

“Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama is running so our children can fly.”

Yet, as I learned of the Civil Rights Movements and Martin Luther King at school, it seemed like ancient history rather than something that occurred within the past 50 years or so. What fast progress to now witness America’s first Black president about to take the reigns. Whilst there seems to be a sense of a new dawn, he inherits a financial mess, an economic mess, an environmental mess in our ever shrinking global village. If ever we need to pray for our leaders it is now.

These posts have sought to return to ancient truths whilst looking at issues we see around ourselves today; church and state; war and peace; God and politics; faith and action. It reminds me of lyrics penned by Woodie Guthrie and put to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Woodie Gothrie’s recording career was over by 1947, however, he kept on writing hundreds of unrecorded songs and these set of lyrics do not have a specifc date, but seem just as relevant to me today as they would have been when dreamt up by Guthrie:

“Let’s have Christ our President
Let us have him for our king
Cast your vote for the Carpenter
That they call the Nazarene

The only way
We could ever beat
These crooked politician men

Is to cast the moneychangers
Out of the temple
Put the Carpenter in

Oh it’s Jesus Christ our President
God above our king
With a job and pension for young and old
We will make hallelujah ring

Every year we waste enough
To feed the ones who starve
We build our civilization up
And we shoot it down with wars

But with the Carpenter
On the seat
Way up in the capitol town

The USA
Be on the way
Prosperity bound”

From “Christ For President” – lyrics written by Woodie Guthrie

I guess that I am learning that Christ is my Saviour and My King. If that is true, then He governs not just where I place my “X” on a voting slip, but how I vote in terms of what I consume, what I re-use, reduce and recycle. It should determine how I vote with how I invest my time. It should influence how I use my consumer vote with my money in terms of how ethical or otherwise my purchasing habits are – how are the goods I buy made? What shops or manufacturers should I avoid (Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” might be slightly dated now, but still serves as an excellent manifesto and call to arms). How many food miles have been involved in my food? Do I buy fair=trade wherever possible? Should I buy organic as often as possible? Is my home properly insulated? Do I use low energy light bulbs and do I switch them off when they are not needed? Do I leave the TV on standby? Do I take the plane when I could take the train? Do I drive when I could walk or cycle? Justice is a big thing. Worship is a big thing.

Hopefully, this little series of posts have got you and I both thinking…

There was an old skateboarding sticker back in day with the slogan, “Don’t die wondering.” Sometimes we need to stop procrastinating, to just act upon things or try them out. At other times it’s good to challenge our beliefs or perceptions. I think it’s good to grapple with how to really apply our faith in a myriad of situations we find around us – surely, that is what we are called to do? The danger is that we just muse and talk and hypothesise.

Whether you have found these posts helpful, interesting or irritating – then I would still recommend the following three books to you:

a) “The Irresistible Revolution – Living As An Ordinary Radical” by Shane Claiborne.

“Love and some verses you hear
say what you can’t say”
From “Love And Some Verses” by Iron & Wine

A friend introduced me to a really great music magazine recently called Paste. I love the tag-line, “Signs of life in music, film & culture”.

It’s lovingly desk-topped and laid out. The journalism is well researched and engagingly written. It has been a joy to read interviews and reviews of artists whom I cherish and it has whet my appetite for a whole bunch of new bands or singer-songwriters I’ve not yet heard.

I saw an inspiring interview with the editors on the excellent Society Room DVD series produced by the Fermi Project. Clearly, two guys who embrace culture and are excited by the expression of ideas through various means of media. I genuinely commend the magazine to you as the interviews often seem to grapple with anything but surface, fanzine-like, sixth form questioning.

Here’s an extract from a fabulous interview with the wonderful Sam Beam of Iron & Wine:

“What Iron & WIne’s music seems to be urging toward more than anything is innocence, and the touchstones in this quest are frequently religious in nature. Beginning with his very first album, Beam’s writing has often used the specific language of Christianity, in lines like “Jesus, a friend of the weaker ones said, ‘I’m all they stole from you,'” (The Creek Drank The Cradle’s “Southern Anthem”) or the heartfelt prayer of Our Endless Numbered Days’ “On Your Wings”: “God give us love in the time that we have / God, there are guns growing out of our bones / God, every road takes us farther from home.” But while it might puzzle some that a self-confessed agnostic like Beam would find consistent inspiration in biblical images and characters that are as likely to converse with the Holy Spirit as they are to address a love interest, for Beam it’s a natural, essential, part of his writing process. “I like to use [religious images] because it starts you off a little bit further along in the story. You know, you could say Bob and Jerry did this, but then you have to explain who they are. But if you say ‘Cain and Abel’ it carries a certain weight. They have a connotation everyone understands, they symbolise the duality in us all…I like using those, because it’s our mythology.”

Yet Beam has always insisted that the role of religion in his writing avoids propaganda of any kind. “I think there’s always been kind of a subversive quality to the way I use religion. I mean, I try to use it both ways, you know, because that’s the way life is. There are some great things about religion but there’s some really f—ed up stuff about it too.” It seems that part of religion’s appeal for Beam is the down-and-out or desperate state of mind individuals are usually in when they find themselves asking religious questions. Such characters always make for a compelling narrative.

With a second round of mojitos on deck and crackling, dry August heat making its presence felt on Guero’s outside porch, Beam pursues this line of thought further. It turns out that religion is not merely a cultural shorthand or creative prop for Beam but, like Johnny Cash before him, it constitutes one of the only three topics he’s genuinely interested in as a writer. “You have your three big things that you can talk about, basically, if you’re going to write something that actually means something to you as a human being, which is Love, God and Death. That’s basically the thing. Love, which occupies a lot of our time, because we don’t like being lonely. God, because everyone wants to know that there’s a reason behind what they’re doing and what the hell is going on. And death is just the reality of your finite time here.””

"The priest in the booth had a photographic memory for all he had heard.
He took all of my sins and he wrote a pocket novel called "The State That I'm In"".
From "The State I Am In" by Belle and Sebastian

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